The demand for ever-improved customer support and the responsiveness expected in the telecommunications, financial and other industries have led to a steady quest for enhanced call center efficiency. Large service organizations such as banks, credit card companies, cellular telephone or other telecommunications providers and other industries with large or growing customer bases demand prompt response time on customer service calls. A common goal of these types of support operations is to reduce customer hold time, improve network and human resources utilization and other service level metrics indicating the speed and efficiency with which customer inquiries are processed. Those inquiries may at times exceed a hundred calls per second or more in large organizations, so that efficiency gains in those and other settings can readily translate to meaningful gains in support costs and customer satisfaction.
In a typical call center network such as that illustrated in FIG. 1, a caller may call into a service center via a long distance or cellular voice network, for instance using a toll-free (e.g. 800) or local number. A routing engine or other network logic may direct the inbound call to one of a set of remote automatic call distributors (ACDs), any one or more of which may be located at separate physical sites. The inbound call may be discriminated to be distributed to a particular ACD based on a variety of call data. That call data may generally include objective information about the call event such as dialed number (DN), caller number such as the caller's number reported by automatic number identification (ANI) or other services, time of day or other information. Furthermore, additional caller data associated with the specific caller placing the call, such as a subscriber or customer account number, may also be captured at the initial stages to help in determining where to send, or how to process, the call. For example caller data may include caller-entered data (CED) such as digits entered on a telephone touchpad in response to voice prompts. Thus a given call may be discriminated by call data such as dialed number or caller number, as well as by caller data, or combinations of the two.
Business rules or other decision logic may then be applied to that data to determine, for instance, that a caller calling in on an identified (800) line who has keyed in a valid subscriber number needs to be transferred to a service customer service representative (CSR) for retention, billing, warranty or other assistance, or to other destinations. Typically, deployment of the call to a CSR pool having a particular skill or tool set or other destination will involve transfer to a local ACD which is trunked to a set of CSR workstations and other corresponding resources.
Once the call has been transferred to a particular local ACD, the call may be serviced, for example, by connecting the call to a live customer service representative, by diverting the call to an appropriate interactive voice response (IVR) unit to query the caller for further data, or by sending the call to other local or remote resources. However, there are recurring difficulties in efficiently moving the call to the most appropriate local ACD and related resources or tools, and thus successfully completing the call.
For one, the call information including call data and caller data which are captured at the front end of the call progression are often not complete or determinative, in themselves. In certain call center environments no more than 25% of the necessary information to accurately distribute a call may be captured at the front end, due to limitations such as lack of time to capture that data, limited data compatibility between various network nodes, or for other reasons.
Therefore, while rules-based logic may attempt to place a call to the ACD or other local resource most suited to servicing that call, in a significant number of cases the call may still be transmitted to a destination which is not capable of satisfying the customer inquiry. In that case, the call must be moved back out of the local ACD and transferred to another remote ACD or other resource. This redirection increases the call pendency since the call must go back into another queue, which may in turn increase the possibility of dropped or customer-terminated calls. Rerouting may also increase the expense for operators who must use toll lines or other metered connections to reach the next ACD site. Moreover, even when a call has been transferred to another ACD or other site, there is no guarantee that the call will be satisfied at that destination. Additional transfers may be necessary. Other problems in call center routing and distribution technology exist.